The Crayon Was Mightier Than the Sword

Published: September 4, 1988

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Naturally, The Masses became the organ of the revolt against formalism. John Reed joined the staff in 1913, and Dell arrived from Chicago later that year. Along with Eastman, they moved the magazine in dozens of new directions at once. Articles advocated free love, divorce, birth control, toleration for homosexuals and sexual satisfaction for women. One of the favorite targets was Anthony Comstock, head of the New York Society for the Prevention of Vice. A cartoon by Robert Minor in 1915 showed the rotund censor hauling a woman before the bench and proclaiming, ''Your Honor, this woman gave birth to a naked child!''

Organized religion got much the same treatment. The magazine was strongly anticlerical, though not atheistic. Its villains were church leaders - lampooned with names like ''Reverend I. Piffletalk'' - who used their moral authority to justify war, condemn striking workers and protect the interests of the ''plutocrats.'' Art Young frequently compared the banality of these churchmen with the romanticized radicalism of ''Christ the agitator'' or ''Comrade Jesus: He stirreth up the Masses.'' In perhaps his most notable cartoon, Young stressed the dominance of wealth over religion by sketching a church nestled between two skyscrapers (or ''business temples'') on a city street. The caption read, ''Nearer My God to Thee.''

There was more to The Masses, however, than irreverent assaults on the establishment. It was still a socialist magazine, a political magazine, intended for intellectuals but committed to what it called ''liberation'' of the working class. In its brief history it produced some of the best labor journalism ever written. At a time when the press conspicuously ignored employer abuses, Reed and Eastman wrote stunning accounts of the I.W.W. strikes in Lawrence, Mass., and Paterson, N.J., and the deaths of 11 children and two women when guards set fire to a strikers' tent city in John D. Rockefeller's Ludlow, Colo., coalfields. At a time when even socialist publications supported racial segregation, The Masses moved, sometimes erratically, to a position of complete racial equality. Indeed, though it liked to portray itself as a ''revolutionary and not a reform magazine,'' it promoted almost every major reform of the progressive era, Ms. Zurier points out, from woman suffrage to child labor laws to the Federal income tax.

Under the leadership of Art Young and John Sloan, The Masses also popularized a new art form in America, based on the rough crayon drawings of the French lithographer and cartoonist Honore Daumier. At the time, Daumier's style was rarely seen here. ''The established techniques,'' Ms. Zurier writes, ''favored detailed drawings with crisply defined contours and a sharp contrast between black and white.'' To those at The Masses, however, Daumier was viewed as both a martyr to free expression, who had been jailed in 1832 for his political caricatures, and a true ''people's artist,'' who had captured the beauty, simplicity and spontaneity of the lower classes. As a result, Ms. Zurier adds, ''the crayon drawing developed into a language associated with social concern.''

Daumier's technique gave The Masses its distinctive look. The artists who employed it, such as Sloan, George Bellows and Boardman Robinson, were known as realists and members of the ''Ashcan School.'' Their object, a realist recalled, was to forsake ''namby-pamby art'' in favor of ''life in the raw.'' Like Daumier, they searched for simple, genuine subjects, unaffected by genteel airs; and like Daumier, they usually found them in the slums of the cities - among blacks and immigrants, peddlers and prostitutes, street urchins and bums. According to Ms. Zurier, these rough realist drawings matched their subjects very well. They were intended ''to look artless - in deliberate contrast to the highly finished techniques preferred by academic painters and magazine illustrators. . . . Style conveyed meaning; the medium itself had a message.''

CARTOONISTS and illustrators flocked to The Masses for very different reasons. Some were devoted socialists who identified strongly - if vicariously - with the proletariat. Others were free spirits, more interested in social rebellion than in political change. What all of them had in common, however, was a belief in the esthetic integrity of The Masses and contempt for the farm scenes, orange sunsets and Gibson girls they were forced to sketch for money in the commercial magazines. Sloan put it well: ''The strange thing was that if I got a good idea I gave it to The Masses. If I got a second-rate one I might sell it to Harper's, but I could never have the same feeling when I was working for pay.''

Once each month, in the spirit of ''socialist cooperation,'' an open meeting was held to vote on the various submissions to the magazine. Stories and poems were read aloud by Eastman, and drawings were pinned to the walls. The discussions often turned angry, as editors, contributors and even visitors rose to mock or defend a given piece. At one meeting, Sloan told a fellow artist, ''There is only one thing left for you to do, pull off your socks and try with your feet.'' Another time, the anarchist Hippolyte Havel exploded: ''Bourgeois pigs! Voting! Voting on poetry! Poetry is something from the soul. You can't vote on poetry!'' When reminded that anarchist editors also made such choices, Havel replied: ''Sure, sure. We anarchists make decisions. But we don't abide by them!''